Cretive Commons Monitor
I think if you are reading this blog, you must be familiar with Creative Commons (CC). But have you ever wondered how widely spread this license actually is? Well, there are people who are thinking about it and even started looking into the issue. Giorgos Cheliotis is one of them. He is currently a visiting scholar at Berkman and earlier this week he gave a talk about the CC Monitor project.
The project has been out there for three years, but the website is rather new and is still considered under development as the team is figuring out the best way to capture and analyze the use of CC licenses around the world. They have built an online (wiki-based) platform/repository which presents the raw data and some visualizations for others to use and think about. This is what global distribution of CC licenses looks like.
There are overall estimated 170,268,161 CC licenses in the world, but the map refers to a subset of them. It includes only the ported (i.e. jurisdiction specific) licenses – those that could be linked to a specific geographic location. Apparently, there are about 50 countries in the world that have strong CC communities who worked on translating and adopting the general licenses to the local jurisdiction.
The darker areas of the map correspond to the higher number of CC licenses in the country. Here is for example what Europe looks like once we zoom in:
If you go to the website, you can see the actual number once you hover over the map with your mouse. The way they collect these data is through counting back-links (or in-links) to specific CC deed pages (like this one). Of course it is not perfect, but it is more than what we had before and it is there for everyone to use. The idea behind the site is to build a “live data wiki”, which brings its own challenges such as the data being updated constantly, but not the analysis and the explanations.
On the wiki you can find data about the individual countries and also what they call “freedom scores”. These scores refers to the degree of openness of the licenses used in each place. As you may know, there are different types of licenses one can give to his or her work. This blog, for example, is licensed under by-nc-sa license, which would not score very high on the freedom scale (and I also need to fix things, so it would actually show here). Overall, this is what the world looks like in terms of openness of the CC licenses:
As before, the darker areas represent higher scores. You may want to take a look at this table comparing the scores of different countries side by side.
If you have the time, I suggest you watch the talk (I wish it was possible to embed videos from Berkman website :). Giorgos goes further into a case study, asking whether people utilize the CC licenses and actually work with the open content. I know that I learned a lot about CC that I did not know about before.
